Our brains are remarkable pattern-finding devices. Too bad there isn't always anything there. In the summer between 9th and 10th grades, I watched the movie Toys as a rental. My brain latched onto one of the scenes where a security guard was at his console. I dreamt of a console that night, though instead of TV monitors, it had a weird clock on it. This clock had a strange way of operating, with labeled LEDs each indicating a time ten minutes apart.
The ones up through 11:00 were lit, and the one for 11:10 was blinking. That morning, I decided to return the video so I would be in my hometown's little business district by the time 11:10 rolled around. I think I was expecting the world to end or aliens to land or something bizarre like that (as if extraterrestrial tourists would pick a town of 2,500 people to be their first stopping point). Nope. But at 11:06, I saw that girl I liked.
Later that day, I wondered if there was some hidden meaning in the time of day when I saw her. You should never do that. I worked out the number of minutes in the day up until that point, and came up with the number 666. I'll avoid trying to apply that observation in any way. That was perhaps the first "premonition" I had, and it came complete with its own warning.
Still, that summer, I couldn't avoid numbers. Maybe I had been too taken in by my math courses over the years or something. It had been over a month since school let out for the summer, and I didn't expect to see her again until I returned to taking classes. Within a few weeks, I'd seen her twice more, and thought I saw another pattern: the time between each event was being cut in half. Well, not exactly in half. The first time, there was a space of 35 or 36 days. Then it was 18. Followed by 9.
As Heisenberg's famous principle states, I couldn't observe this without making an effect of my own. The spacing did eventually dwindle down to just one or two days apart, but by that point I had partial control over the situation. It was a pattern, but the idea that there could be any meaning to it was totally invalid. Of course, it didn't help that you can't subdivide beyond 9 without getting into trouble. 4.5 days? How can you measure that? Oh, I'm sure statisticians could find some tricks—definitely something that makes you doubt numbers and shows that they can lie ;-)
So, I had a few of those things happen over the years, which just made things worse. Not many float above the noise, though. I was wrong at least as often as I was right. I dreamt she changed her hair color one night. She did, and I even got the color right—red. (I think I told her about that one, which is just...bad.) I dreamt that her boyfriend was convicted in some trial and sentenced to serve 51 or 52 days (maybe 151 or 152—the memory has faded). Well, he was still around the next day.
Dreams didn't happen very often. I wanted them to, but that wasn't the way things worked. Subject matter left something to be desired as well: The most common theme involved catching a fleeting glimpse, then running around to find where she disappeared to.
Wow, it's amazing I can remember this. I suppose I'm writing it down so that I can finally allow myself to forget. Just another step in letting go. In an odd way, things continued up until the very end: I myself had forgotten about the entry that got her attention, but stumbled across it again last week, likely within a day of when she did. The night before I finally heard from her, I prayed to finally know what she thought or at least get a glimpse of who the mysterious person in my future will be. Of course, it doesn't count, since I had made the same request of some higher power countless times in the past. I now know one part. I just hope that finding my future won't take another decade.
Posted by mike at March 16, 2005 07:58 AM | Self | TrackBack